


heroes always get remembered (but you know legends never die)

by Chill_with_Penguins



Series: i'm heading straight for the castle (they want to make me their queen) [2]
Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, Evie & Jay & Mal & Carlos de Vil as Found Family, Gen, I REGRET NOTHING, I Tried, I promise, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Isle of the Lost (Disney), Minor Original Character(s), Non-Graphic Violence, Origin Story, but I did this instead, but they'll get out of there eventually, it's not graphic but it's there, my poor island children, read the other fic, so many feels, the Squad gets together, the isle isn't a good place, they deserve better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 09:28:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17423288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chill_with_Penguins/pseuds/Chill_with_Penguins
Summary: There is a boy. He's small, grimy; his clothes hang loosely, bits of fabric that swallow up sharp ribs. He is no different from any of the others on the Island. He walks and talks and smells the same.Except: his eyes.They're dark, almost black, peering out from between dirt-darkened skin. His eyes, which should be vacant or terrified. His eyes, which dart every which way, bright as a spark (as an ember) (as a match against the night).(Mal is six, so far from being the woman she will become, but that doesn't change what she is (the only thing dragons love more than gold is playing with fire)).He doesn't look different, doesn't act different, but in his eyes--well. He's something else.~OR~I didn't expect my other Descendants fic to get so popular. I actually said "well no one will read this but here goes anyways" as I hit post. And then? It's the one with the most reads??? And you guys somehow surpassed 1,000 hits??????Anyways, here's the prequel no one asked for but hopefully you guys will enjoy reading anyways. It's more dark & gritty Isle, but with a happy (ish?) ending, because let's be real, I can never resist one of those.





	1. jay

_I see what's mine and take it (finders keepers, losers weepers)_

 

There is a girl. He doesn't know her name, doesn't know anything about her, really, except that she had pretty purple hair and bright green eyes. Her eyes fascinate him. They're like emeralds and precious jewels and if she weren't so alive, he'd probably steal her for his father, come home and hold her up like a trophy, say,  _ look, Papa, look what I found for you, won't you be proud of me now? _

But she is alive. And he remembers, vaguely, distantly, a dark-skinned woman with eyes like the night sky and scars like thick, winding ropes; he remembers how she used to whisper to him, before she vanished into the smoke and sand and otherness like everything else the bastard child in the palace once knew, that he could steal and lie and hurt, but only to protect himself, and never if it meant stealing or hurting someone else. 

(What? Even villains can't just create children out of nowhere. The Isle is crawling with orphans.)

He doesn't remember much about her--the pretty woman, who smelled like sage and salt and desert heat. But he remembers her scars and her voice, so low and serious, telling him never to steal a person, never something alive. He can't explain why, exactly, but it's a rule he follows, one he's long since engraved on his bones and scraped into his skull. 

So. The girl, although pretty, can't be stolen. Not just her eyes, either, because he's seen what it looks like when eyes are pulled out and it's too gross even for him, all blood and seeping liquid and fraying nerves, screams that rattle out across the streets. It's no good for someone like him, all slim fingers and quick stealth and easy theft. Too loud and bloody and messy. 

The girl, pretty and un-stealable, is following him. Has been for a few blocks now, ever since he left the loosely-defined school and she trailed him out the door. She's not very good at it, he notices as she ducks behind a stack of rotting crates. Not the worst kid he's seen, but not very good, either. 

He tries, for a while, to figure out why, to deal in abstracts and theories and possible motives. He's never been too good at that, though. It drives his Papa crazy, how he can't think his way through a room he isn't in but can dart through a store and be out the roof with the most valuable merchandise in a heartbeat. 

It's not that he isn't smart or can't think. It's just that he deals better in concrete facts, in things that are _ here _ and  _ now _ and preferably things he can touch. Everything makes so much more sense that way, laid out one-two like the solid punches that the fighters at the docks land. 

(One day, he promises himself, he'll get them to teach him and then when he gets caught he'll have more than just his stumbling tongue to get him out. Everything will be better when he can let his fists do the talking for him.)

Eventually, he gives up on trying to work it out. He has the facts that he needs, for now: There's a girl. She has pretty hair and prettier eyes. She goes to his school, sits in the room with him. She's been following him for seven--now eight--blocks. 

He doesn't know what she wants, or what to do about her, so he just keeps walking, heading to his father's store. Either it will work itself out or he'll be on familiar ground to confront her, so it's a win-win as far as he's concerned. 

She follows him into the store, eyes wide and feet light, and he waits for her to make a move, but she doesn't. She just stands there, peering uneasily around a stack of somewhat-soggy stationary, watching him, her eyes darting back and forth between him and his father. 

(He doesn't know what she's looking at. His father hasn't noticed he's back yet, and it's not like he's doing anything particularly interesting.)

He starts toward her, stuck somewhere between curious and angry, and she wheels around with a small "eep" and pretends to be intensely invested in a stack of miscellaneous junk. He's about to interrupt her, ask her what she's doing and who she is and all that, but his Papa calls him over and he never gets the chance. He makes a mental note of where she is and what's near her, in case he has to steal any of it back later, and scurries off to find out what's happening. 

When he comes back, an hour later and with bruising fingers, she's still standing there in the musty light, her eyes trained on the old painting he had found a few weeks ago in a shipment of junk. He didn't see what was so special about it--just a dark sky with white splotches, a city lurking in the background. It's not like you can even see any of the people or places or stores. Still, there's something improbably serene about the picture: just a little girl, purple hair in yellow light, staring in such complete awe at a few white and black dots on a worn-down canvas. 

"What's your name?" he asks. He's not entirely sure where that came from; he didn't have a plan when he opened his mouth. 

The girl startles, blinks wide eyes and stares at him. She hesitates, chewing on the flesh of her lip, and he wonders why she always does that. He sees her doing it pretty often, sitting alone on the other side of the rusting playground equipment.  

"Mal," she finally responds. "Who're you?"

"I'm Jay. This is my Papa's store." He eyes her critically, forehead furrowed skeptically. "You're not gonna steal that, are you?"

She blinks again, as if startled by the idea, and a small laugh escapes her. "No, I'm not. I don't think I really could. It's too big."

"Not for me, it's not!" he says, puffing up with pride. "I stole that one myself, like three weeks ago!"

She eyes him with interest, a trace of doubt shadowing her face. "Really?"

"Uh-huh! Here, I'll show you," he says,grabbing her and pulling her out the door. Somewhere behind him, he thinks he hears his Papa yelling with a customer, but this is more important. He has to show her how good he is, or else word might get around that he's anything less than the best thief on the Island. 

(It doesn't occur to him, so small and fueled with adrenaline, that he's never actually seen her talking to anyone at all. That she probably didn't have anyone to gossip with in the first place. He'll think of that, years later--think of his small, seven-year-old self with that desperation to please everyone and Mal's little six-year-old hand in his, the loneliness in her eyes, and... He won't say anything. That's not how it works, at least not between them. But the next time he sees her he'll hug her a little tighter, just for a second.)

It's only after he's stolen half a dozen pieces of jewelry, two lamps, and some candy for good measure, that he thinks to ask about the painting. 

"What'd you like about it, anyway?" he asks, feet swinging wildly over the edge of the building. He's always liked perching on the roof--it feels safer than the ground, harder to get to, unless you're small and quick and fearless like him. 

"About what?" Mal askes, 

"The painting. In Papa's store."

She straightens up, flushed with excitement. "Oh! It had the stars."

"Stars?" he asks, feeling out the unfamiliar word.

"Yeah! They're these big balls of fire, tons and tons of miles away, and the whole night sky is filled with them when you're not on the Isle!"

"Are you sure? Wouldn't that make everything too hot and bright? And why wouldn't you be able to see them from the Isle?"

"Don't be ridiculous, they're too far away for it to be hot or very bright. And if they didn't exist, then how do you think pirates got around?"

"Pirates?" he says, leaning forward with a hint of anticipation. 

"Uh-huh," she replies, matter-of-fact and very smug about it. "The stars are like a secret treasure map that only pirates can read."

Jay scoots towards her, his excitement quickly increasing. "D'you think you could teach me?"

Mal glances toward him, chin high and shoulders slouched. "Yeah," she says finally. "I guess.  _ If _ you teach me how to steal."

" _ Deal _ ," he says, near-instant and dead serious. He holds out his hand to shake, because he remembers that Papa always does that when he closes a deal and he smiles late a night, flashes the metal of whatever watch he stole and says "good business". Mal doesn't have a shiny watch, but he figures it's the same basic idea. 

She shakes his hand, and Jay adds a list of statements to his facts about her. There is a girl. She followed him to his store, stared at a painting of stars, and asked him to teach her how to steal. Her name is Mal. She has pretty purple hair and prettier green eyes. She's (almost) his friend.

"Where do we start?" she asks, eyes bright in the darkness. 

*

Later, after years and scars and fighting, before the war that saved their home, he sees a man with scars, thick around his neck and wrists and ankles like splitting rope. He follows him to a dark room that stinks of  _ sweat-fear-rust _ and bites his tongue so hard his whole world goes red when he realizes it's a slave auction. 

He goes to Mal first, before Carlos and Evie because they're still too new, too unknown, to trust with this. He tells her in a quiet, controlled voice, about a beautiful woman with dark hair and dark skin and thick scars, tells her about rules against stealing people. He tells her there's a slave trade on the Isle, that he doesn't know who or how or why but that he's seen it. 

A week later, in the middle of the night, the homes and businesses of everyone associated with the trade mysteriously go up in flames. No human is ever sold on the Isle again, the fear too rapid and wild to be quelled by the promise of profit. 

Barely a month after that, Mal pulls the four of them together. She carves up the Isle and calls for (what isn't yet) a summit meeting between the gangs; she walks in with nothing but the blood on her teeth and walks out with the title banrion. 

Not for the first time, and not for the last, Jay is glad that he found her. That she found him. That they have each other, because on the Island, friends are as rare as rainbows and family is harder to come by and someone like Mal? Someone who is both and more all at once? That's a goddamn miracle. 

He thinks of their gang, their family, of the precious invisible lines that connect them, fine as gold wire and stronger than braided spider silk, and thinks he may have finally found a treasure he couldn't have stolen. 


	2. evie

_ I am so much more than royal (snatch your chain and mace your eyes) _

The alley tastes like cheap death, spoiled in the sun, and smells even worse. Vaguely,  some part of her wishes she had Mother's perfume bottle so she could spray the whole area and stop her stomach from shaking so badly. 

(The rest of her knows better. Mother would beat her for using the perfume again, and there's not much point, anyway. It's not the smell that's making her queasy.)

The man is swaying slightly, his eyes unfocused and his hands latched tight on her arms. "Well, aren't you a pretty little thing?" he slurs, leaning close to her. Her back is to the alley wall, cold, rough-cut stone digging into her shoulder blades where her sleeves have started slipping, and everything feels like panic. The man--she didn't bother learning his name before she lured him out here--reeks of moonshine and sweat. 

She shoves her fear back down her throat and wishes the world would stop moving so much. "I can be whatever you need," she says, and the words come easily after all the practice. 

("Tell them you can be whatever they need," her mother had said, smile wicked-sharp and eyes dead-cold. "You can. You will be whatever they need, whatever I need you to be, until I tell you otherwise. Do you understand?" 

And she'd bowed her head and said, "Yes, mother," quietly, and she didn't flinch when her mother pressed the dagger into its sheath in her corset.)

(And then, years later, the fight and the screaming and her mother had shouted, face slowly turning purple, "You're useless! How dare you take up space in my house, eat my food, wear my clothes, when you behave this way? Get out! Get out and don't come back unless you bring me the heart of a man you killed!" 

And Evie left and she spent two days trying to find food and realizing there was no other way and she found herself in an alley that tastes of cheap death with a man who doesn't know what's coming and her stomach won't stop twisting itself into new shapes--)

His eyes are dark, trailing up and down her body and she's never felt so vulnerable, so terrified, but that's okay, everything's okay because she'll kill him and then she'll be able to eat again, be able to think about anything but the hunger that is clawing at everything inside her. She waits for a heartbeat, lets him get a step closer, and grabs for the knife she tucked away earlier, lunges at him with the desperation of someone about to die. 

He knocks it out of her hand, pins her back against the wall. Laughs. 

(She remembers flipping through a book on animals, feeling tears well up when she sees a glossy photo of a butterfly, little bits of metal through its wings and heart, splayed out like some sort of grotesque beauty. She remembers wishing she could reach through the paper and set it free.)

(It's so, so easy to forget that Isle kids didn't just grow up on an island. They grew up in a prison.)

He presses hasty, bruising kisses against her lips, her neck. He grins at her and says that she has a lot of spirit, that it'll be fun to break her. 

She's just opened her mouth to scream (not that it'll do her much good, screams are more or less ignored on the Island) when his face goes blank and he crumples to the ground. Behind him, there's a girl with dark purple hair falling in waves and a boy with a grin that glows with mischief. The boy is holding a pipe in his hands, looking surprisingly casual for someone who just knocked out a man three times his size. 

He glances at the girl, something unspoken flowing easily between them. "I still say I could've done it with my fists."

The girl rolls her eyes, and Evie notices that they almost seem to glow in the dark, just a few shades away from some of her mother's potions. "And I still say that you've been taking lessons from him for less than a week, so no, you couldn't've. Besides, there's no shame in using a weapon. Some people would even call it smart."

"Yeah, until they lose it and have nothing to defend themselves with."

It sounds like a well-rehearsed argument, but there's no heat from either of them, no sign this could turn into something more. There's just comfort and familiarity. 

She doesn't know what to do with either, because she's never seen them before. 

The girl turns away abruptly, facing her with cool, assessing eyes. "You tried to kill him. That was pretty bold. Who are you?"

"Um. I'm Evie." She wishes she had something better to say, but she doesn't. Her mind has gone blank from a combination of fear and relief and unceasing hunger.

There's a trickle of recognition in the other girl's face, and she makes a quiet hum of acknowledgement. "Oh, yeah. You're that girl who didn't invite me to her party."

Evie's mind whites out from fear. This is Mal. Mal the daughter of Maleficent. Mal whose mother made her life a living hell. Mal who is the reason she's been locked in a castle with Mom for the last almost-three years. Mal, who has now seen her starving and desperate and who saved her. 

Mal, who could destroy her so easily. 

She knows she should fight back, but the adrenaline is already fading from her veins and her knees are weak from hunger, so instead she waits. The knife that slid out of reach before is just a step away from Mal. It's only a matter of time before the other girl uses it. 

Instead, Mal laughs. Throws her head back and laughs, light and easy. "That was such shit. My mom is so dramatic."

"You--you're not gonna kill me?"

She snorts. "What for? We were, like, six. Besides, I like you. You aren't afraid."

Evie thinks about correcting her. She thinks about saying that she is afraid, that she's always afraid and it was only desperation that drove her to this point. She thinks about saying that she cowers under her mother, that her heart always feels one wrong beat away from collapsing in on itself. 

Instead, what comes out is, "Do you have any food?"

Mal grins, fishes around in her pocket and tosses a granola bar at Evie. "Eat at your own risk. I stole that from Gil and Uma's on a warpath."

She doesn't know who those people are, other than the hazy memory of something to do with blue frosting, but she's pretty sure "warpath" is a bad sign. Also, the granola bar tastes more like lint than anything else. 

She still almost cries when she can finally feel something in her stomach other than empty space. 

Mal watches her eat, notices the way it's gone too quick. Something in her softens slightly, like there was a wall Evie didn't even know existed that fell out of place. 

"Come on," the girl with eyes like potions says, "Let's go see how many apples we can steal from LeFou before he notices."

She stands, knees still shaky but not as weak, and follows. 

(A little less than a day later, the whole story comes out, tumbling from her lips like she's cursed. Mal listens, bright eyes going stormy, and stands up suddenly. She tells Evie to follow her, tracks down the man from the night before despite him being halfway across the Island, and corners him in an alley not so different from before. She hits him, hard, and Evie watches from the edge, her breath caught in her throat, as she  _ doesn't stop hitting _ .)

(In the end, Mal walks over to her with bruised knuckles and bloody hands, her face white and her jaw set. There's a chunk of red muscle turning the cloth it's wrapped in red between her hands. She passes it to Evie, says, "Here, now you can go home." Doesn't mention that it's her first kill, that she's actually pretty shaken by the feel of death-chill beneath her fingers (because of her fingers), that she's surprised by how much it's messing her up because everyone knows it's only a matter of time before kids have their first kill. She doesn't say any of those things, but Evie sees them anyway. She takes the heart, doesn't look at the corpse. Says "thank you". Leaves.)

(She comes back two days later, finds Mal in a loft she's claimed as her own. The whole place smells like spray-paint and there are constellations drying on the ceiling. Neither girl ever mentions the tears.) 

She knows, of course, how rare, how fleeting, friendship is on the Isle. She knows that this won't last, that it  _ can't _ . That there are blood feuds and years of silence and so much more between them. She knows it's fragile and desperate and doomed. 

(She clings to it anyway, because it's hard enough to find someone who will live for you or die for you on the Island. Stumbling across someone who will kill for you, especially after only a day, is either the best or the worst thing that's ever happened to Evie.)

It doesn't really matter, though. Because when the two girls look at each other, when they share little half smirks and quiet laughs and the last of a chocolate bar, in no particular order, there's something deeper--less fleeting--than friendship. Something that they can hold on to when the rest of the world is falling to pieces. 

(They won't figure it out for years and years, but here's a hint: it starts with l.)


	3. carlos

_ Done my time and served my sentence (dress me up and watch me die) _

It starts, like most things do, with his mom. With his mom and his closet and the way he's been swaying when he stands too fast for... three?... days now, a combination of hunger and throbbing headaches and lemon-scented stain remover making it steadily worse. So on the beginning of day four, when his mom screams his name and he rushes to his feet so he can get there quickly, it's not exactly a huge surprise when he crumples right back down. 

It does, however, throw him off when the world doesn't stop spinning. It just goes and goes, and he's seeing black spots and having trouble breathing and he knows that there was a little bit of blood from where he hit his head on the coffee table a few days ago, but those things usually heal on their own. 

Somewhere from the depths of the house, his mother is still screaming, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn't think he's physically capable of doing what she needs. He thinks, distantly, the vague memory of anatomical textbooks floating through the haze in his mind, that he's dying. 

He lays there for a minute, gaze lost in the darkness, his eyes trained on the door and the boarded-up windows all around him. 

(He's dying. He's dying and this house is choking him, is suffocating; he's dying and _ this house will not be his grave _ \--)

He can't stand, but he can crawl, so he does. If Cruella finds him, she'll kill him faster than whatever his broken body is trying to do; if she doesn't, he can finally learn what freedom tastes like. It's a win-win. 

He makes it outside, out of the yard, off of the street. His hands are bloody and he doesn't know where he is. 

(He's  _ dying _ and this isn't _ fair _ \--)

He makes it to a cramped alley before his muscles give out. A vague, distant sort of disappointment settles over him; he'd hoped he would make it far enough to see the ocean for the first time, but his fingers are spasming and he can taste blood in his mouth and he cannot physically move any further. 

He looks around him, at the stink in the air and the rats scuttling across the damp ground, like they can tell if they stick around for a few minutes more, they'll get a meal out of it. 

He's not sure how long he sits there, listening to his own struggling heartbeat and feeling the pain radiate out from his lungs to his head to his raw fingertips with every breath. Everything feels numb, after a while. 

(He's  _  d y i n g _ \--)

The darkness feels less complete, somehow. Less smothering. His eyes shift upwards, and somewhere, through the smog that's settled over the Isle, he can see the faintest hint of orange. 

He didn't get to see the ocean, but maybe he can at least see the sunrise before he's gone. 

A tear falls, fast and hot and burning, down his cheek. Then another. He tries to stifle them, to work up the strength to wipe them away, but gives up after a minute. 

(There's no point in hiding weakness when he'll be dead in a matter of minutes anyways.)

(Oh, god. He'll be dead in a matter of minutes.)

(He'll be--)

(He's--)

"Oh," he hears a girl say, surprised. "He's alive."

"How is he alive? He looks like he's in pretty bad shape," says another. Carlos is still crying. He thinks he should probably stop, but that's work, and it's all so heavy, his limbs are all so  _ heavy _ \--

"It doesn't matter, he'll be dead in a minute anyways. We should see if he has anything valuable."

"Please, Mal. Don't," says one of the girls. 

There's a moment of silence, followed by some shuffling feet, and then they're pulling him up. Carlos would argue, if he had more energy. He'd tell them to leave him be, to let him die in peace and have this nightmare that is his life finally, finally end. 

But he doesn't have the energy. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth, dense and lethargic, and the idea of forming words is so much  _ work, _ so he just... doesn't.

He doesn't know where they are, much less where they're going. All the streets are a haze of unfamiliarity and lingering, bone-deep pain with every step forward they take. He's not quite sure, but he thinks he may have actually blacked out for a while there--he had blinked and suddenly it was much brighter, and he was laying down, his face inches from a grimy-looking floor. 

His first thought is that Mother will be so mad at him for missing this spot. 

His second is  _ wait, no, I wouldn't be alive if Mother knew I missed this spot, and I don't recognize this tile at all, where am I? _

"Ah, good. He's awake," he hears someone say. He shoves himself up, forearms straining under his own admittedly tiny weight, and does his best to look around him for something, anything, he can fight back with. 

He doesn't know where he is or who these people are but he'll go down swinging. 

"Hey, De Vil." It's a girl with dark purple hair, just a few shades off from that old velvet couch in the foyer, who's striding toward him. He knows he must be imagining it--knows it must be a trick of the light--but for just a moment, he swears her eyes flash the same green that a flame does when he tosses little bits of copper in. "You gonna tell us who you pissed off to get hurt like that?"

Carlos stares up at her, blinking. His tongue feels like sandpaper in his mouth and his head is pounding, now that he's moved. 

"C'mon, kid. You've got to give me something, here. I need to know if someone's going to come after us for giving you shelter."

"You're not that much older than me," he says, more out of instinct than anything else. Instantly, he wishes he could take it back. He doesn't know much about the nebulous rules of social encounters, but he's pretty sure that you aren't supposed to start by correcting the person who saved your life. 

(He's pretty sure that on the Isle, you aren't supposed to save someone's life at all, which could explain the faint hint of nervous energy around the girl in front of him.)

Still. He's not wrong, and Carlos has never been very good at regretting stating facts. 

"And you don't need to worry," he tacks on, when he sees her still waiting for an answer. "My mom doesn't like to leave the house."

A flicker of...  _ something  _ crosses her face. Not quite pity, but maybe--sympathy? Understanding?

Frustration gnaws behind his eyes. He's pretty smart, he should be able to figure this out, but--ugh. Books read by weak moonlight can only take you so far when the only human you've spent considerable time around is your mother. He hates that he can't read most people very well and he hates her for being the only one he can. 

"Good. That buys us time," she says, satisfaction curling across her features. For just a second, he can picture her perfectly as a cat, stretching out with easy, lazy confidence. Or maybe not a cat--maybe something older, more scaled and scarred. Something with that fire he saw gleaming in her eyes. 

"Time for what? Who's us?"

"Time to figure out a cover story. And us... that's me--Mal--and a couple other Isle kids. You're Carlos, right?"

He nods, immediately regrets it. Now his head is pounding and the world is swaying. 

"Don't worry, Carlos. At least for now, you're with us."

*

The best thing about being out of his house, he quickly realizes, is the learning. 

He had done his best with Cruella. She'd taught him to read and write, so he could order her things from the magazine catalogs, but he had pushed himself the rest of the way to learn and experiment and grow. When he was small(er), he'd stumbled across a new room in the wing of the mansion he was cleaning and discovered a nearly untouched library. It was small, granted, but it was a treasure trove of words and learning. 

There were plenty of novels--fantasy and romance, mostly--but they didn't catch his attention nearly as well as the nonfiction science. What use was reading about far-off forests when he could harness tangible power, give himself the ability to manipulate and control matter or energy or his surroundings?

(He was small but his mind--well. There was no library in the world big enough to house all his ideas.)

And now, all of it--the experiments and notes and years of research into nothing, into everything, into science for science's sake, it's all gloriously useful and his for the taking. After the first time he rigs up a trip-wire shock bomb, the others look at him (impressed they're impressed with him  _ they're impressed with him _ \--) and grin. Later, Mal pulls him aside and says, a grudging fondness in her eyes, _ that was pretty cool. Think you could do something like it again, if I found you the right materials? _

And for the first time he can remember, Carlos  _ beams _ . 

(Later, in the history books, Mal Dragon-Daughter and Evie All-Healer and Jay War-Stopper won't be the only ones remembered for famous deeds. One day his name will be attached to units of measurement for magical potency, for electromagnetism, for theories about universal casualties and subatomic particles. He will walk through the streets of an Isle that's not perfect--arguably not even good, really, but getting there slowly--and the next generation will look at him with awe in their eyes and hope in their palms and whisper to each other:  _ that's him. That's the one who broke the barrier.  _

_ That's the one who set us free.) _


	4. coda: lonnie

_ I'm taking back the crown (I'm all dressed up and naked) _

Years later, after the war and the battle and the blood, after she's been a general and a lover and a mother (though not necessarily in that order), she still remembers how it felt to stand in the shadows of the bleachers, watching swords flash in the light and feeling her stomach sinking down-down-down while her skirt fit too tight around her legs. 

She's sitting on the porch, drink in hand and breeze tugging at her bangs. It's the most relaxed she's felt in months. Li--barely six and already buzzing with ideas for her future--runs past with short, uneven hair. Lonnie blinks and leans forward to check, because surely she was just... no, her daughter really does have a foot less hair than she did half an hour ago. 

"Li!" she hollers. "Come here!"

The kid--her kid, she thinks, that same rush of pride and joy the same after all these years--shuffles up, head hanging low and displaying the uneven cut. 

"What did you do?"

"I cut my hair," Li says, raising her face to meet Lonnie's eyes. There's a fire in them, Lonnie thinks, that will serve her well later. 

(The world is better now, than it was before. It has flourished under Ben's rule, under Mal's. But it is still not kind to little girls who dream, no matter how many battles they wage.)

"I see that, baobei, but  _ why _ ?"

"I don't think I'm a girl, Mama. I think I'm a boy. And Susa said boys have short hair, so I cut mine."

Lonnie smiles, blinks back sudden tears, shoves away vague memories of her own childhood, uncomfortable dresses during Sunday dinners at her grandparent's house. 

"Alright, Li. Alright. Let's go even out that haircut, and then you can help me go through your clothes and decide what to keep."

"Really?" Her little girl--her son, she corrects herself, if Li feels like a boy then he deserves to be treated as one--is looking up at her with wide eyes. 

"Really," she promises. She also makes a mental note to figure out what, exactly, he used to cut all that hair off and promptly destroy it before he can find a way to hurt himself/the cat/the furniture, but that can wait, at least for now. 

"But... Temo said you would hate it if I told you that. He said you wouldn't love me."

And _ wow _ , Lonnie hasn't felt anger like that in decades. She didn't even know she still  _ could _ feel something that strongly, but the rage pounding through her veins makes her think it'd be pretty easy to strangle that kid in Li's class right about now. 

Still. That can wait. 

"Well, Temo doesn't know as much as he thinks he does. Come here, baobei," she says, holding out her arms. Li throws himself into them with the complete trust only a six-year-old can muster. "I want you to know that it doesn't matter to me, okay? Whether you're a girl or a boy, or neither, or both, it doesn't matter. You will always be Li and you will always be my greatest love, and _ nothing _ is ever going to change that."

"You promise, Mama?"

"I  _ promise _ ."

The world isn't perfect. Lonnie knows this; she's stained her skin red trying to correct it and watched as nothing changed. 

But slowly, she thinks as she holds her son close, they've been making it better. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, beautifuls! Thanks very much for reading, as always <3
> 
> So. Uh. This was... a little bit of a dark story, what with the abuse and the sexual assault and the murders and all that. Whoops?
> 
> At any rate, I hope you enjoyed it. I haven't actually read the books (or at least, not in a very long time), but I watched the movies with my little sisters and this was my little headcannon of how they all became friends. Plus Lonnie, because she's epic and deserves to be in any story. And then Li, because he stole the show when I was supposed to be writing about how far she's come.
> 
> Ugh. My characters are so insubordinate. 
> 
> At any rate, a billion thanks to my bff, who's crazy talented and crazy polylingual and told me that I should use baobei (which literally translates to "precious" in Mandarin) as Lonnie's nickname for Li. And also, I guess, for the years of unconditional support, but eh. *waves hand* It's mostly the world-building stuff. 
> 
> Also all of the thank yous to my brilliant, beautiful beta, Blackbutlersecrets, who you guys should all go check out. She's fantastic and she kicks ass in heels, so you know. You all want to be her friend. 
> 
> Anyways. Yeah. 
> 
> Come scream with me about how great this series could've been if Disney wasn't made up of a bunch of fucking cowards :)
> 
> (PS--Li decides that gender is a stupid social construct so he/they decide fuck it, let's change this. Then he/they become the next president of Auradon and save the planet from climate change, because it's my fic and I say so.)


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